Remember
by Amazonian21
Summary: A collection of Gaara/Sakura one-shots. Things we need and things we want, and all the things between. COMPLETE, ongoing at will.
1. Remember

**Remember**

By Amazonian21

* * *

"You're shorter than I remember," he says, and then wishes he hadn't said anything at all. What a dumb thing to say, really.

She almost doesn't answer him, because it's one of those sentences you're never sure how to take. Is it an observation? An insult? Something to pass the time while waiting for your laundry to finish? She settles for raising an eyebrow and snorting.

He fidgets and wonders why this has to be the way he'll spend the next five minutes. He hasn't seen Sakura for five years now and can't say he's been all that upset about it. It was easier not to see her. She still looks good.

It was hard for her, however, not to see him. She was very upset about it all these years and is glad to see him in person at long last. This way she can let Gaara know exactly how little she missed him, how little she liked him to begin with, and how unimportant it is to be in front of him again. She makes this point clear by examining her nails and surreptitiously glancing at her watch while holding up her end of the 'conversation'.

"So...," she drawls, exhaling the word like a leaky tire, "what brings you here, anyway? Konoha's a little out of your way, I think."

'Not that she cares,' her nails say as she turns them in front of her eyes, 'she's just asking to be polite.'

"Mission," he says, satisfied that one little word can halt all future interrogation. Classified is classified, and she's ninja enough to know the hows and whys are no body's business. Prying isn't healthy or fruitful. Especially useful to him right now, because not only does it bring her up short and kill this stupid gab session, it also leaves her a little frustrated and annoyed.

He's doing one sentence answers again, and darned if it doesn't annoy her. She knows that he knows that she knows he knows she knows he's only doing it to cut the rug out from under her. That's what really gets her goat. He once talked to her in full sentences. She'd get paragraphs out of him. A novella could spill forth with the right prompting, and now he's giving her one word designed to shut her up.

Well. She considers talking anyway, just to foil his little plan, but suddenly she doesn't feel like it so much.

Sakura is twenty-five. Gaara is twenty-five going on twenty-six. They are ancient. They are the older generation of ninjas in charge of raising the newer generation of ninjas. Those upstarts are all amazingly talented, each with a ripe destiny yet to be revealed, but probably centered on the chunin exams.

It's guaranteed that soon Sakura's genin team will go through life altering trials and tribulations that will miraculously unleash their own unique powers and abilities. Within a few years they'll have worked hard enough to surpass her own skills, though she is now one of the legendary Sannin.

Gaara doesn't have a genin team, but he does have several ninja in his village dying to prove their strength against the Kazekage. They annoy him, but he is their boss, so for now he doesn't let it get to him. He will be allowed a peaceful retirement when someone replaces him. Suna no longer calls for a fight to the death for all who seek to be Kazekage challengers. This is probably for the best, because right now Gaara is still the strongest and would have been forced to kill many of his most able, most ambitious men. That would only weaken his village.

But Sakura and Gaara are no longer the plucky young heroes. They are the senseis, the boring has-beens with amazing feats to their names and adventures recounted around camp fires, but nothing new has happened to them in the last year or so. They might as well consign themselves to the pages of the history books because no one currently has their eyes on them. That is how it always goes, and how it has always been. Sakura talks to Kakashi sometimes, but not much. She got all she needed to hear out of him one day when she lit into the subject. He just looked at her and said, "Sucks, huh?" She agreed. It sucked.

They are boring.

And old. Looking at Gaara makes Sakura feel ancient.

Sakura looks at Gaara and remembers when he was possessed and insane enough to crush her to death slowly in front of her teammates because a raccoon in his head told him to. She remembers when she was crazy enough to land a punch on him three years later because he refused to help her rescue Naruto from Akatsuki wannabes. She remembers both of them living through their insanity long enough to meet up again five years after that for a whirlwind affair.

She doesn't, however, remember how that affair started.

Gaara remembers. Looking at Sakura, absorbed in her nails so falsely, brings back floodgates of memories. Deciding not to kill her for hitting him because he felt he deserved it- Naruto deserved all the help Gaara could give him, truthfully, but his people needed him more right then- and the pain of her blow relieved a little of the guilt he'd pretended not to have. He remembers her leaving with determination to save him herself, and she'd done it. He remembers sending her a private letter, an apology, later, and he remembers she wrote back that he could go suck a duck. They were so young. How did they not know that?

He remembers seeing her five years later in a small town in the middle of the rainy season. She looked awful. Some women might be water nymphs and frolic about in the summer showers like spirits of earth and air, but not Sakura. She was tired, she was wet, and she was pissed. It was so freaking attractive because it was so raw and unrehearsed. She was truly in her element, back then. She'd surpassed her great teacher and was acknowledged to be more powerful than the fifth Hokage. She could kill or heal with alarming alacrity and already had rumors following her wherever she went.

Was it true she'd been chasing down an army of rebels only to flick the ground with her index finger, creating a crater that swallowed up seventy-five men and their horses? It was. Was it true she then tore off the leader's arm in front of his men, only to immediately reattach it in front of their very eyes, all the while yelling that forgiveness would come their way if they'd stop killing Konoha citizens in the outskirts? Yes, it was. She did that. Back then.

He saw her, so confident and so deadly, and he decided she was what he wanted. That was it. She must have understood what he meant when he asked her if she planned on staying outside in the rain all day, because she followed him to his room without any other questions.

It was wild and raw. It was slow and sedate. It rushed, it never hurried, it was amazing and it lasted three whole weeks. Only some very creatively constructed letters kept their villages from coming after them as missing nin. The fact that he was the Kazekage and that Naruto was the naïve Hokage definitely helped, of course.

They talked. Gaara remembers talking as they lay in bed, sated and sleepy, and tranced out of their minds as they trailed lazy fingers over flesh and said words that meant more then than they could now. That was why his brain would not let him remember. They were Then words, and not Now words. He remembers the feel of comfort, the eternity of an hour, the speed of a week.

Gaara doesn't, however, remember how that affair ended.

Sakura remembers. She remembers endings. She is a woman of endings and retreating figures. She has done the math. She knows at exactly what altitude a person approaching the horizon will diminish to an invisible speck. She knows her calculations are correct because she checked her work when Gaara walked away, three weeks after pulling her out of a rain storm in a tiny village, casually saying, "Thank you" as he left.

Sakura was too young to hit him for breaking her heart. She'd been young enough to hit him for refusing to help Naruto way back when, but too young to know when violence was really necessary. She let him walk away, when oh how she wishes she'd made him crawl.

With no legs left.

Who says "Thank you" after three weeks like theirs?

But Gaara doesn't remember and Sakura doesn't remember so between the two of them their affair simultaneously never began and never ended, and this was going to be the longest five minutes either of them had ever spent.

Gaara thought about one word endings and Sakura's nails lied and lied.

* * *

A/N: For anyone who's gone back home, when home is not who it used to be. We are only getting older, you and I.

This will be a collection of unrelated one-shots when I feel the urge. I'm mostly flexing my writing chops, rusty as I am.


	2. Delicate things

Delicate Things

By Amazonian21

* * *

His sister had a cat once. It was a scrawny orange and white tabby she'd bottle fed since it was a mewling, tiny two-week-old pathetic excuse for an infant.

They'd been returning from one of many S ranked missions one especially hot summer day, silently passing through a dark alley in a V formation. Gaara led the way, siblings flanked behind him as always. He'd been thinking of nothing, his mind whistling like the dunes on an arid summer night, calm and falsely serene, lulling and hypnotic. An old trick and lasting habit from the days when his own mind caged a beast that made the howling of the desert seem tame in comparison.

Temari may have been thinking of any number of things. To this day, though they are closer, he still could not tell you how her mind works or what she ponders when there are no external demands on her attention. She was, however, more in tune to their immediate surroundings.

It was she who heard the slight rustle and the halfhearted cry coming from the rubbish piled sloppily to their left.

Gaara didn't stop and turn until she'd already stooped, pushing aside some trash to reveal an appallingly tiny and skinny little ball of stripes, eyes still partly closed, barely wiggling as she raised it in one palm to eye level. An orphaned kitten, mother who knows where, left to the mercy of a Suna summer to die in the garbage of the back alley.

Gaara never formed an opinion about saving its life. There was no mercy in the desert, but neither was their conscious cruelty. Unlike him, the desert and its city killed indiscriminately and without enjoyment or maliciousness. The desert would not mock this kitten, but it would kill it surely, because the weak and the forgotten were buried here quietly with no one to see them pass.

Temari, however, had other ideas. With no words she pressed the kitten to her chest and stood, smoothly taking the lead position and heading steadily back towards their home. She offered no explanation and neither Gaara nor Kankuro thought to ask for one. What she did with her own time was her business.

The kitten lived and became the most spoiled, ridiculous pet Suna had ever seen. It had no fear and no sense of self preservation. Its first memories were of kind treatment at the hands of humans. Temari had fed it, kept it warm, cleaned it, and even stimulated its bowels when it was too young to handle all bodily functions. It was no wonder the thing thought it was human.

The worst part was the kitten's choice of companions. It was Temari's cat through and through- when she was home it curled under her chin and purred on her chest. When she slept it lay on her head and kept contact with her at all times. Temari was this kitten's world, and his devotion to her was spectacular.

Until she was gone on a mission and Gaara was the only one home. Then all bets were off and loyalties were shelved until they were convenient once again.

The kitten followed him into the bedroom. It followed him into the bathroom. It perched on the sink while he relieved himself and tried to follow him into the shower. It offered its opinions on his wardrobe selection while dressing. It chewed on any paper work he dared to read instead of petting it. It followed him while he ate, slept, or breathed.

This would have been annoying enough as it was, but Gaara was constantly unsettled in the presence of this cat. It had absolutely no sense of personal space or self preservation. Every other step found the kitten directly under foot, millimeters away from being trampled and broken by his heavy boots. Many times it was only Gaara's superior training that allowed him to correct a misstep that would have surely broken a teeny kitten leg or worse. He nearly kicked, almost squashed, sort of jostled and just about mangled a little orange nuisance each time he turned around.

He didn't want to hurt the thing, but it didn't know it should be avoiding him. It didn't know he was a monster, didn't know what he was capable of.

She reminds him of that kitten.

Her hair is pink and not orange, and her eyes are green instead of yellow, but she shares more similarities with the small mammal than her surface would lead you to believe.

She showed up one summer afternoon on a pilgrimage sanctioned by the Hokage. Naruto had understood his friend's desire to honor Chiyo-baasama, even though ten long years had passed since their fateful encounter with Sasori. He knew she was determined to use her hard earned knowledge and power in a way that would make the old granny proud and help bury the remains of her bitterness over her defeat at Tsunade's hands so her spirit could rest freely. Naruto granted her three months to travel to Sand, with the Kazekage's blessings, in order to further study the foreign and potent toxins native only to the brutal desert region. In return, Sakura was to train Suna's medics in techniques to combat some of the poisons they regularly encountered but could not neutralize.

She did that, to be sure, with a studious and single minded air. During business hours she was focused and intense, rarely looking away from her projects and experiments as she gathered the medical staff around and put them through their paces. She didn't bother him at all. During business hours.

After five o'clock, however, and all weekend long, she was constantly under foot. She showed up at the house to talk to Temari about whatever it was adult girls discussed- their hair, makeup- heck if he knew. He couldn't walk into his own kitchen without seeing her perched on the counter, one leg crossed over the other and her hair carelessly tossed back as she laughed at something his sister said. So effortlessly, no trace of formality and no awkwardness.

She would turn to him and acknowledge his presence openly with an easy, thoughtless smile, asking him how his day was as if he hadn't signed an execution order, denied emergency rations to a village known to harbor enemy rogues, and sent three teams off on separate assassination missions, all before noon. She smiled and had a warm laugh for him too, with no sense of self preservation at all.

When Temari left for a date, waving casually over her shoulder as she left, Sakura didn't make her excuses and flee his presence now that her buffer was gone. Instead she continued her line of questioning, gesturing for him to have a seat at the table and continue where he'd left off, three word answers to her probing questions about his work and life. He didn't know how she did it but she was verbally relentless. She followed him down the hallway of his conversation, pursuing him into the bathroom of his discussion, watching as he relieved himself and coaxing him to expand on his thoughts. She was not intrusive and asked no impertinent questions, but she was thoughtful and thorough in a completely disarming way.

And then, when she landed on a topic that got his attention more than others, she seized upon it ruthlessly and gnawed at it like a kitten with a string. She got him talking about a type of flower she'd come across in her studies that was rare for its toxicity and potential use in herbal poison remedies. It was more commonly known, however, for its elusive blooming habits. Like many desert flowers it came to life only at night, deep in the shady crevices of rocky nooks. It was difficult to find the petals of this flower because they shriveled and died as soon as the sun hit them, effectively losing their beauty and their potency.

Gaara had seen them bloom with his own eyes, a phenomenon Sakura had never had the privilege of witnessing. The desert was his love, his blood and life force- he'd seen many of her secrets. He loved talking about the brutal, poisonous beauty found in the arid wastelands, but no one cared to discuss it with him. They were all too busy enduring or surviving the desert and had no interest in appreciating the cause of their struggles.

Sakura, however, loved the plants of the desert almost as much as he did, and she didn't make him feel ridiculous for waxing poetic over the waxy, fuzzy coating some shrubs developed as a way of conserving water. She let him talk. In fact, she encouraged it, simply by being interested.

She didn't go away the entire time she was there. She pulled him into cafes to discuss her research, using his experience to help gain new perspectives on what the locals faced on a regular basis. She dropped by his office with proposals and funding requests, walking straight into his office with no sign of reservation or formality. She called out to him across the street, sending pedestrians into cardiac arrest, and enthusiastically waved him over shouting, "Oy, Gaara!"

He didn't know what to make of it. She didn't know she should be avoiding him. She didn't know he was a monster, didn't know what he was capable of.

He was often covered in blood, no stranger to death rattles and pleads for mercy. He was a killer, sanctified by his government and title, but still a killer. He worked for his people and for redemption, but he still glorified in the kill, still exulted in victory. The one-tail was gone, but his blood lust was not forgotten.

She put herself underfoot all the time, and he was terrified that one day he'd break her.

He didn't know how to act around a delicate female. He didn't know how to avoid hurting her feelings or keeping her from seeing that he was just a sane, slightly more tamed version of the monster who'd tried to choke the life from her all those years ago. One day he would slip and she would be damaged, leaving in a swirl of pain and taking with her the unconscious comfort she'd brought the day she stepped into his city.

And then, one day, he got a clue.

They were looking for ingredients for Sakura's never ending experiments. The greenhouses couldn't hope to keep up with her demand for more plants, forever more plants. She'd dragged the entire staff out of doors armed with baskets, clippers, flasks, and various other paraphernalia to scour the desert for everything she needed.

Gaara was returning from a brief visit to the outskirts, meeting with a local tribe of nomads who'd requested entrance to his city for trade. He'd met with their chieftain for all of five minutes before his instincts told him something was wrong. Maybe it was the way all the females of the group shied away from the males, maybe it was the desperate looks they sent him, but all he could think about while listening to their leader was rumors of missing girls that had reached him in Suna. No one had raised the money to commission a mission to investigate these disappearances, but Gaara decided on the spot that would change.

He cut the meeting short and made his exit, not taking any care to extend the man courtesy or ceremony. As Kazekage he could not unleash hell on this tribe without an investigation, but he could send a team out immediately to discover the reasons for his instinctive reactions.

The chieftain must have sensed his intent because as soon as Gaara's team disappeared from sight he sent all his warriors after him, ninjas and civilians alike. There must have been two hundred of them, all with the intent of silencing the Kazekage before he could bring them any trouble.

Gaara met up with Sakura and her fellow medics as they were heading out and he was heading in, unaware that he was leading two hundred killers and kidnappers right to her, pulling them down on her head.

The battle was fierce. The enemy was surprisingly well organized and strong, using jutsus known only to the indigenous people, bloody and brutal with their use of sand. Gaara was concerned for the first time in a battle, desperate to protect Sakura, the woman he'd unintentionally pushed into harm's way.

He lost sight of her in a whirl of sand, desperately using his own powers to tame the torrential winds that blinded them from all sides as the fight raged on. She would be crushed in all this.

And then he saw her. She alternated between medical precision, severing a man's head from his body with a single slice one moment and brutally punching the earth to create a sandy death pit the next. She slaughtered countless men in moments, keeping pace with him as he met opponent after opponent on an increasingly bloody field.

And he heard her exultation, her glee as she yelled, "Hell yeah!" before wiping out her enemies, deaf to their screams as she gained her victory.

She was a monster. He knew her, then, finally. She was not a delicate kitten always under foot. She was a killer, a slayer of men.

Just like him.

He felt like a fool for wasting so much time, and for belittling her in the process.

The next morning Sakura woke to a single blossom resting on her pillow. The deadliest bloom plucked at midnight and carried in a perfectly black, velvet lined jar in order to preserve its deadly properties. She smiled as she traced the beautiful deadly thing with one finger and sighed happily.

He finally understood.

* * *

A/N: To those of us who are not as good as we would like to be, and definitely not as nice as they're afraid we are. Precarious pedistals.


End file.
